Those rules are easy to [http://git.eclipse.org/c/swtbot/org.eclipse.swtbot.git/tree/org.eclipse.swtbot.generator.test/src/org/eclipse/swtbot/generator/test/RecordComboTest.java?id=4946c6c9f846cd4c5a81aa397f41ca43259cf8c7 test with JUnit and SWTBot].

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Those rules are easy to [http://git.eclipse.org/c/swtbot/org.eclipse.swtbot.git/tree/org.eclipse.swtbot.generator.test/src/org/eclipse/swtbot/generator/test/RecordComboTest.java?id=4946c6c9f846cd4c5a81aa397f41ca43259cf8c7 test with JUnit and SWTBot], so please create a similar test-case when creating a rule!

Purpose and limitations

What it does

The test generator can be enabled on any Eclipse-based application at runtime. It monitors at UI events as they are performed by user and the generate some pieces of code that can be reused later in automated tests to playback user actions.

Limitations

Some conceptual limitations of UI recorders (which are true for SWTBot Generator, but also for Selenium or other recorder/playback engines):

There are several ways to identify a widget, the recorder will choose only one, that may not be the best

The recorder understand "atomic" UI operation, which may be too fined-grained compared to what you want to test

The generator is not aware of your code style and tastes, so it may generate code that is not conform to your standards

The generator doesn't know what to check, it's just a bot: it's your role to add assertions and other checks

All those points mean that the generation of code is only something that makes you save time by replacing some code writting, but the generated code always needs to be reviewed and enriched with assertions and probably improved.

A limitation that is specific to this recorder and Eclipse is that it does not (yet) support GEF.

How to get the maximal benefit from it

Speed up the process of creating a test: instead of writing directly code, start by running your test scenario with the generator enabled. You'll get a huge part of your code already written down, ready to go into a TestCase. Then improve that code is necessary and add your assertions and checks.

Ask users to provide their scenarios as code: If possible, when a user has a bug, ask him to start the recorder (you could embed its enablement in a higher-level menu - Help > Record usage scenario -to prevent end-users from doing complex operations); and ask your users to post the generated code. It will reduce the gap between users reports and unit tests.

Screencast

Installation

The Test recorder and generator is a single plugin to install in any RCP application (may it be your Eclipse IDE, or a bundled RCP application. You can get it from the SWTBot update-site/p2 repository (starting from version 2.0.6).

Programmatically from a plugin

This is useful to start the recorder from menus, buttons or anything. Just make sure the bundle you're developing depends on org.eclipse.swtbot.generator and when relevent, invoke the following code to open the recorder Window:

org.eclipse.swtbot.generator.ui.StartupRecorder.openRecorder();

Usage

The generator window generates code, copy-paste it where you want

Extending it

Rules mechanism

The recorder places some SWT listeners that look at events and generate code from each event. A Generator support is just a set of "rules" that are classes that process (or not) the current event to generate some code. Processing an event is divided in 2 pieces:

Contribute your own Bot support

There is an extension point for that in org.eclipse.swtbot.generator. We recommend you to get the source for the org.eclipse.swtbot.generator plugin and see what's in it. The default SWTBot support is installed as an extension too, so you can take it as an example.

Contributing

The contributions tools and process are the same as for any SWTBot part. See SWTBot/Contributing.